The Super Mobility Week is a week-long conference in Las Vegas that focuses on mobile and connected technology. AT&T’s hackathon takes this one step further and asks developers to create some kind of app, device, program, etc. with the focus on a connected home or car (or both!).

SparkFun is including the CC3000 WiFi shield in its kit of parts for people to play with. This shield allows Arduino-type devices to connect to the Internet. Out of the box, the CC3000 can connect to a WiFi router and create basic TCP connection to a server. Luckily, a TCP connection allows us to send and receive RESTful API calls (e.g. GET, PUT, POST, DELETE). That means we can talk to any service that implements the RESTful API.

AT&T’s M2X happens to be one of those services. Similar to other Internet of Things services (data.sparkfun, Xively, Electric Imp, etc.), M2X offers a place to store data, so long as your connected device can communicate with REST-style HTTP calls. For example, I can record the temperature in my office for a period of time and look for trends.

It’s starting to get a bit toasty in here…

A neat trick with M2X is that you can perform a GET command to retrieve the information in a data stream followed by a DELETE to remove all of that data. If these commands are used in conjunction, you can create a very crude Producer-Consumer model with the M2X stream. You can have one device logging values to a data stream and another device (on the other side of the planet) consuming those values to perform some action.

Here, I have set up a basic LED circuit that turns off whenever it sees a “0” in an M2X data stream and turns on for any other value.

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